Chapter 17 The River of Death
Is there a boundary between life and death, and if so, what is the distance between life and death? John Bunyan, the author of Pilgrim's Progress, set the boundary at a distance of the intensity of death. In reality, there is no boundary, only a biological one. When we humans deal with someone on their deathbed, we think of that moment when the breath passes out and the head drops down as the boundary between life and death. God has no the boundaries, nor did He create any. He created it to be perpetuated by the new life in my body by living and believing. He confirmed it with the resurrection of Jesus on the cross and the promise of his coming again.
At last Christian and Hopeful reached the river of death.
"But I can't see anything; I can't see an inch."
"Brother Christian, let the faith of Christ bring peace to your heart! He will get you across, you mustn't try to do it."
The river roared again with strong winds and fierce waves.
"Christian~! Christian, this is the river of death! We must cross it, there is no other way."
"Hopeful~! Hopeful~! I'm sinking, I can't cross!"
"No, Brother Christian, I can feel the ground beneath me, we can cross!"
"I see a door there... I can feel the weight of my sins! My sins are sinking me, I can't do it!"
"No, Christian, the burden of your sins is already gone, open your eyes and look, you can cross!"
"No, it's too deep, I'm forsaken, my sins must be too great!"
"You are a new creation, look there, God is waiting for you, he promised you."
"That... yes, I see it again. I can see the other side, there... There!"
And so the two pilgrims crossed the river of death and arrived safely at the gates of heaven.
They were greeted by two angels.
"Welcome, welcome, we will now take you to heaven."
"But how do we get up to that high heaven?"
"It matters not to you now how high or low the hill to heaven is, for you have already left your bodies in the river."
When Christian and Hopeful heard this, their hearts leapt. They really didn't feel the weight of their flesh.
Two Pilgrims Crossing the River of Death (2022)
The death of 'Purmi' the stork
I am reminded of 'Purmi', the stork who died next to me on the river of death. As a zoologist, it's not easy to see animals dying in the wild, which means we see their bodies, but we don't see them on their deathbeds. It was around the time I first started working with storks that I received a donation from the 'Welt Vogel Park' in Walslode, Germany. They gave me four breeding storks and sent me their oldest male, Purmi, who was well over 25 years old at the time. With an average life expectancy of 30 years for storks, this was an old stork.
He came to Germany as a chick from the Amur Nature Reserve in Russia. At that time, the Walserode Bird Park in Germany had introduced the globally threatened Class 1 protected Korean stork from Russia and had already achieved success in captive breeding before us. He was used as a breeding bird and came to Korea after it was sexually past its productive age.
When he was 28 years old, his food intake decreased in winter, and he was unable to climb up to the 1 metre-high torch. Especially in cold weather, when the temperature dropped below minus 10 degrees Celsius, he would sit on the ground because he was weak from lack of food, so he had to live with a heater in winter. However, he no longer had the strength to do so, and we realised that he was dying 20 days before her death when his food intake was noticeably lower than normal.
He was missing a lot of feathers, and the muscle mass hidden beneath the feathers had shrunk so much that if I touched him, all I could see was bone. He had barely eaten in the week before he died - no, it's probably more accurate to say that he stopped eating to die - and he was curled up on one side of the aviary with his long legs folded, waiting to die. A day before he died, his head began to droop downwards. When I entered the holding room and touched his body, he showed no resistance. It was six hours before he died that I saw his eyes closing repeatedly as he breathed heavily. In the end, Purmi passed away at the age of 32. In human years, she would have been around 80 years old.
Saying goodbye to a stork 'Purumi' (2016)
Facing the river of death, I wondered if I could end up like Purmi. I find myself thinking about it more and more. Perhaps it's a sign of my age, but more than anything else, it's because I see more and more people around me living with dementia and being cared for by nurses. Somehow, it seems clear that these days, how we die is more important than how we are born. The words of the Biblical Psalm (73:4-5) become a prayer for me: 'They have no pain in death, and their strength is strong; they have no affliction like others, and no plague like others'. Perhaps John Bunyan's reason for featuring Hopeful in The River of Death was that he wanted all Christians to live with Hopeful. The apostle Paul is clear when he says "Sin made death something to be feared...but by the one victory of the One who is life, both sin and death have been done away with" (1 Corinthians 15:57). I confess that it is time for me to take His life into my body, and now, with my flesh nowhere to be found and only my redeemed Lord dwelling in me, I am walking my last pilgrimage to St. Isidore's with the river of death in sight.
Jesus on a donkey
On the final pilgrimage to St. Isidore's, we come face to face with a sculpture of Jesus entering Jerusalem on a donkey before his crucifixion. When Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a colt with a huge crowd, it was Passover. Passover commemorated God's deliverance of Israel from slavery in Egypt, so the Jewish hope of future liberation from their current problems was very strong at this time, and Rome had troops stationed in Jerusalem in case they needed to put down a riot. By treating Jesus as the object of this hope, the crowds began to realise that this teacher was the Messiah who could lead them against Rome.
Jesus on a donkey (2022)
Surrounded by a crowd chanting "Hosanna!", Jesus seemed to be focused on something else entirely. He didn't look at the excited crowd; He didn't wave; He looked beyond the noise and agitation and saw what lay ahead of Him: a torturous journey that would lead to betrayal, torture, crucifixion, and death.
There was Jesus, but there was also a calm acceptance. There was insight into the fickle human heart, but there was also overflowing compassion. Above all, there was the presence of love. There was a love that was endlessly deep and infinitely wide, born of unbreakable intimacy with God and reaching out to everyone in the world. There was nothing He did not fully know; there was no one He did not fully love. Every time I see Christ on this donkey, I am reminded that He sees all my sins, guilt, and shame and loves me with all His forgiveness, mercy, and compassion.
After the crucifixion, He was buried on the third day, just as the Bible predicted. For 40 days, Jesus didn't appear to Annas or Caiaphas or Herod or Pilate, who had sentenced Him to death. He didn't appear to Nicodemus, His bumbling disciple, or Joseph of Arimathea, who buried Him. There was no "I was right after all," or "Didn't I always say that?" This was an event that was simply hidden deep in time.
Mary Magdalene saw a stranger in the garden. Globo and his friend walked with a stranger on the Emmaus road. The disciples thought it was a ghost when the stranger entered the room. Peter, Thomas, Nathanael, John, James, and two other disciples heard the voice of a stranger calling to them by the lake. Jesus was present as a stranger in all of these ways.
The Resurrected Jesus (2022)
The people of Emmaus
The two men of Emmaus were returning to their hometown, discouraged and disillusioned. They had been oppressed under Roman rule for years. They had never known true freedom, only a vague longing for it, so when they met Jesus, they were hopeful. They thought this Nazarene would bring them the freedom they had longed for. But it was all for naught. The man they had placed their hopes in was arrested by the Romans, sentenced to death, and crucified.
Cleopas and his friend were disheartened, despairing. The thought that their great expectations had once again been dashed made Cleopas and his friend even sadder. Jesus joined them on the road, but they didn't recognise him.
People often think that Jesus died and came back to life immediately, but that's not what the Bible says. Jesus had been lying in the tomb for three days. They were so concerned that his body would be gone soon that they took a large stone and sealed it in front of the tomb. Three days means that even his body had decayed. The two men at Emmaus had a deep sense that everything was going to end in vain and that there was nothing we could do to stop it, that was despair.
Jesus in dialogue with the two men on the road to Emmaus (2022)
The Lord was looking at them in their despair. Jesus already knew from experience what our human despair is: He knew death and the grave, He knew our finitude. Cleopas and his friend must have sensed that this stranger was no stranger; He knew them too well to remain a stranger for long. They knew that He was not about to offer them the comforting words of a secular sage.
He was giving them the reality, based on His own experience, that life is stronger and greater than death and decay. This is something that can only be understood by the heart. Luke, the author of the Gospel of Luke, does not write that 'they were enlightened' or 'saw the light'; he writes that 'their hearts were burning within them'. The burning heart showed Cleopas and his friend something entirely new. Something had arisen in the midst of their existence, at the very centre of human existence, that disarmed death and neutralised despair. It wasn't just a new perspective, a new joy of life, a new confidence - it could only be described as new life, a new soul. In today's parlance, it would be more appropriate to say that 'a spiritual life, a spirituality, had begun in their hearts'.
Cleopas and his friend invited this stranger into their home to have dinner with them. As they sat down to eat, he took bread, blessed it, broke it, and gave it to them. Then they realised with unshakable conviction that this guest was Jesus, the same Jesus who had died and been buried in the tomb. But just as that conviction dawned on them, Jesus was nowhere to be seen.
Cleopas and his friend (2023)
Something so profound had happened. The moment Cleopas and his friend recognised Jesus in the breaking of the bread, they no longer needed His physical presence as a condition of their new hope; the intimacy of their relationship with Him had wiped away His strangeness; they no longer needed His physical manifestation as a basis for hope because He was so close. They realised that the new life born in their conversation with Him on the road would never leave them, and would give them the strength to return to Jerusalem and tell others why it was not 'all over'. So Luke records that they immediately went back and told Jesus' other friends about their experience.
I have passed through the river of death in the John Bunyeon Pilgrim's Progress and are now enjoying a life of wholeness, healing, and integration through faith in the resurrection of Jesus. I confess that by His Holy Spirit living in us, we will be made alive again like the body of Christ. When He died, He dragged sin with Himself, and when He rose, He brought eternal life down into me. Christ already lives in us in this body we now live in. It's just that the "river of death" of the Christian life is a process of letting this body go down the river, and now it's clearer that the resurrection of our bodies and eternal life awaits us Christians.
